The Rationalist Passion (part VI)

Men saw
it well. Kant turned aside from his road. Goethe stopped on his own for a
moment. Beethoven took all the winds of heaven to breathe his hope into them.
What matter if the France of this great, live century is occupied almost
entirely with reason and but little with art! She had quite enough to do with the
old myths that were to be beaten down, with the young myths that were to be
anticipated, and with the terror and the love that had to be imposed with iron.
She had had Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Jean- Jacques, and Vauvenargues.
She had had Buffon, who recreated the earth. She had Laplace, who recreated the
sky. She had Lavoisier, who recreated water and fire. She had Lamarck, who
recreated life. Germany was offering her hymns to the multitudes and thereby
unchaining their spirit.

Mysterious
flux and reflux of souls! While an atrocious war was stifling Germany, the
aristocratic France of the seventeenth century was erecting the intellectual
scaffolding of which German music was first to take possession, in order to
give the support of the heroes to the voice of the people. Until Wagner, French
rationalism will guide German music. Without the architect Descartes, Sebastian
Bach would not have come; and Beethoven could not have introduced Rousseau into
Occidental passion if Bach had not taught him how to give order to symphonic
masses according to the intelligence, lifted up by doubt to a feeling of its
reality. The peoples were communing over the heads of the Christian sects. And
French thought, in order to vanquish the Catholic theocracy, was borrowing from
Protestantism its preoccupation with morality, even as German music, in order
to vanquish the Protestant theocracy, was borrowing from Catholicism its
architectural genius.

It is
doubtless in music that we must look for the pursuit and continuance in the
souls of men of the moral upheaval which prepares the death of the ancient
theocracies; and the French Revolution stands only as the tragic passage of
that upheaval into fact and law. Music is the most universal and the vaguest
voice, the one always used by men to rejoin one another when they are most
dispersed. It appears in Italy like a despairing appeal when the Renaissance
has broken open the sheaf of social energy. When architecture is dead, when
sculpture is dying, and painting is reaching its full expansion, music is
hardly more than born there. Here is Palestrina, with his great wave rising and
descending like a breast, the long sob which does not die away, the swelling
voices which call to others, and the more valiant and pitiful hearts which sustain
the other hearts. A century passes. The dispersal becomes more pronounced, and
only one voice arises: the melody of Monteverde has the quality of the
painter's arabesque; it unites into a line as hard and continuous as a
sculptured volume the contradictory sentiments of an anarchical crowd, which no
collective sentiment can bind together any longer. Another century passes. The
despairing eloquence of Arcangelo Corelli is already broken into by strange
cries; his line, too tightly strung, breaks in places; he feels that he is not
understood. With Marcello, we no longer hear more than a voice of iron, and it
awakens no echo. But in other places, other crowds are stirring. Lulli has
already carried the Italian soul into France, where Gluck, the German, will be
understood. Watteau, the Frenchman of the north, feels the current of hope
coming out of Germany, and through the German of the south, Mozart, an infant
Hercules of music who trails garlands of flowers through the tones of concerts
and balls, there opens to Italian passion the formidable vessel which Bach has
just constructed, in which the voices of Handel and of Haydn awaken multiple
echoes, and in which there is already the dull rumble of the cry of Beethoven.

Between
the innermost circle of the élite and
the people, everything is effaced at that moment. The hero of the spirit sings.
The people acts. No halfway art connects them, and none is necessary. All
hearts beat together. The passage from one world to another is affirming itself
irresistibly in the popular symphony which is embodied by Danton within the
country, and which, later, is carried beyond it by Napoleon. But perhaps there
is not more than one artist in France who feels that this passage is being
accomplished in the spirit of the masters of intelligence by the voice of music
alone. Prud'hon is a musician, even if he is unaware of it. In the art of this
lover of form, everything occurs with relation to form, in the warm shadow
which causes it to recede and which accentuates its depth. If the Revolution
manifests itself in David through the stiff tenseness with which he draws
himself up as he stands at the brink of the abyss, before the radical
overturning of the horizon, it is felt in Prud'hon through the insensible
progression with which the luminous surfaces emerge from the obscurity. From
the superficial harmonies which Boucher and Fragonard, following Tiepolo and
Lemoyne, associated in space by a slight brushing together of the paint, he
penetrates to volumes modeled right in the material, and it is in the
complicity of his penumbra, where the transition takes place, that Romanticism
in painting appears for the first time. Prud'hon has read the Confessions, and the Nouvelle Héloise also, it is certain,
and even Paul et Virginie, which he illustrates,
but which his insinuating and sensual art dominates with all the force of a
passion drawn from sources infinitely more pure than the sentimental wordiness
of the salons of fashion. He loves
the sculptured form which steals away and turns gently, pursued by the moving
shadow. As he has the secret of making bosoms breathe, of caressing trembling
breasts, and round limbs as they emerge from a kind of twilight, it is his
right to give to them, as a frame, the dark woodlands full of brooks, and their
murmuring leaves, and their black and slanting trunks. Certainly, he tries to
obey David, whom he esteems; and Rome, where he passed several years, watches
over him. But it does not touch him. And then he has seen Greuze. And above all
he is Prud'hon. The severe profiles are softened by sensual languor, the
attitudes of the statues sink as if under a weight, until they become tender
gestures and loving abandon. The bosoms of the vestals bear down the folds of
the antique robes, and the arms of the tragic muses are heavy with
voluptuousness. The necks of all the women continually swell with the sighs
which he seizes on their warm lips; and their eyelids know the pain of waiting
for happiness or of seeing it pass. His women have the maternal abandon of those
who love deeply and for whom man is always the child. Gluck is still very near
to him. And the tender Prud'hon is the last evening of the dream of pleasure,
of nostalgia, and of music which Watteau had begun, and which is on the
threshold of a dawn bathed in a bloody mist.